148 Scarcity and Surfeit
(SADC) are two schemes that offer the best chance yet to achieve this.
Although Burundi's application for EAC membership is with the regional
body, it remains to be approved. Regional integration will provide much-
needed economies of scale and thus efficiency and cost-effective production,
improving the earnings of the member countries' populations. Economic
diversification, furthermore, will serve to render member countries less vul-
nerable to the vicissitudes of the international market for primary products.
Burundi clearly stands to gain from these potential benefits.
Conclusion
This Burundi country study has analysed the country's conflict and explored
the peace process. Emphasis, indeed the focus, has been on the contribution
of ecological variables in the conflict and how these have been appreciated
or ignored in understanding the broad contours of the conflict and how best
to factor them into the search for peace.
The emergent picture is disheartening. Not only has there been an insuffi-
cient appreciation of ecological variables in the conflict in Burundi; there
have been only token considerations of these in the construction of architec-
tural plans for peace. Stewards of Burundi's predominantly agricultural-driv-
en economy have cleverly concealed some of the primary structural defi-
ciencies that have been at the forefront of motivating the continuation of the
conflict. At the centre of this state of affairs are the parochial and self-inter-
ested impulses of perpetuating and expanding elite privileges at the expense
of the bulk of the country's population.
As noted in the introductory chapter, politics has dominated discourses
about the conflict in Burundi without sufficiently appreciating the essence of
politics: who gets what, when and how. Underlying this appreciation is the
equally valid truism that politics arises from, among other things, scarcity.
Burundi has been ruled by a political-military oligarchy that tightly con-
trols the state and appropriates all decision making without recourse to citi-
zens' demands and desires. Where the majority of the citizens' lives are inter-
twined with their land and its resources, it need not be emphasised that their
demands will invariably be ecologically linked. In this respect the successive
Burundi governments have resorted to coercion, repression, and violence in
addressing citizens' grievances.
At the centre of the conflict in Burundi are unjust structures, among which
are the ecological management policies instituted by the country's various
administrations. As a result, and to find a comprehensive solution to the
country's conflict, settlement of the conflict is insufficient; transformation
must remain the overriding goal.